


Purple Prose

by Larathia



Category: Final Fantasy IV
Genre: Community: fic_promptly, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-03-03
Packaged: 2018-03-16 03:05:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3472109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Larathia/pseuds/Larathia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Romances are the hardest to write."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Purple Prose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wallwalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallwalker/gifts).



The ink had dried on the quill, again. Edward sighed and put it back in the inkpot.

What bard couldn't write a romance? Well, most of them, really, and for the same reasons Edward was having trouble. Either you had a woman in mind, in which case the desire to elevate the beloved above all others led to phrases like 'cerulean orbs' and 'alabaster skin', or you didn't have a woman in mind, in which case it was quite difficult to think of evocative yet generic descriptors to let listeners mentally fill in the blanks.

Write what you know, said the sages, but Anna was dead and while he'd seen her ghost, he wasn't sure that qualified as 'romantic' material. Sahagin had been involved. And his heart still bore the wounds, there; he hadn't felt that way about anyone at all since her death.

But if he was going to try and keep up the practice of traveling Damcyan as a bard and not as its prince, then he needed songs that weren't _about_ himself as prince, and that meant not about Anna either. 

Manicured fingernails drummed perfect time on the tabletop, ignored. Unless...perhaps if he took it right back to the beginning. Before she'd known who he was, before he'd known who _she_ was...first meetings were suitably romantic even if they _did_ involve accidentally bowling over the petite woman because the lute had rather obscured his ability to see her.

_I stumbled 'cross a maiden fair  
Who swore fit to lay bones bare..._

Well, it wasn't exactly romantic, but it was how it had started. Anna's father had - probably without intending to - given his daughter a quite respectable vocabulary. He picked up the quill again, writing it down.

The nice thing about blue eyes was that so many pleasant words _rhymed_ with it. Unfortunately, the descriptors were 'sky' and 'sea' and after that one found oneself reaching for the thesaurus - _no_. Keep it real. Even if the heart did twinge, thinking about Anna's lovely, laughing eyes. Especially right after she'd knocked him into the mud for running into her like that.

Perhaps it _would_ work as a song, if he kept himself the butt of the jokes, which wasn't under the circumstances all that hard to do. He could probably even work in the terror they'd both had of her father finding out about the relationship, if he avoided naming names.

Underneath his quill, the song took shape, with regular crossings-out as phrases of the flavor of 'limpid pools' and 'shivering moon' escaped before he could censor them. Anna deserved better. She'd been no phantom of the ideal, but very much real and present and anchored in the moment, and she deserved to be made real before listeners.

He did have to hit the thesaurus after realizing he'd used 'blue' too often. But 'navy' seemed to work without being too florid, and it would even work in the verse provided he toyed a bit with the word order so he didn't have to rhyme it.

By the time the candle had burned down to the stub, he had most of a comedic yet utterly romantic ballad of a young oblivious swain getting a solid left hook by the girl of his dreams. He smiled. 

Tellah was really going to throw something at his head for this one. But at least he'd have the pleasure of seeing audiences react, first. Edward set the quill down, satisfied.

He could probably manage to go a whole month, now, before having to write another.


End file.
